‘Go,’ Tyris voxed.
The two Space Marines pushed themselves through the hatch and into the thin, void-boundary layer of the upper atmosphere. The Sister followed a second behind.
‘Next.’
Vega and Iaros stepped up to the breach, a second woman similarly positioned between them. If Tyris had once thought the mortal women in need of protection, then that misconception had been cleansed from him over the weeks of joint exercises and training. They were simply too valuable to go in first.
Maglocked though they were, Tyris could picture the Doom Eagle shifting from foot to foot as he would in practice, eager to be away. He had come to know them all, better than many of his own gene-brothers, and he knew therefore that the Ultramarine would hesitate on the threshold and glance back.
‘I have an ill-feeling about this, brother-sergeant,’ said Iaros.
Tyris glanced to the silent Sister, felt his gut coil at the nothing that filled her space.
‘Don’t we all.’
‘We do not,’ voxed Vega.
‘Go,’ said Tyris, lest the Doom Eagle jump alone, and once again the three warriors pushed themselves through the open hatch.
Alone inside the coasting gunship’s assault bay, Tyris moved to the edge.
He held a moment, heart swelling, eyes drinking in the view.
There was no wind. No pull of air or ding of particulates hitting the fuselage. No howl of decompression. Just inside, outside, and nothing but the liminal between them. Half an eye on his visor’s countdown timer, he spread his arms, disengaged maglock, and pitched forward.
Sunlight hit him like a bolt-round in the face. It overloaded his auto-senses and bleached his view to whites and greys. Bleeps and chimes alerted him to temperature and radiation warnings, failures in his suit’s auspex, vox, and power distribution subsystems. There was a reason that Antares cursed with a reference to ‘bright skies’. Work ceased. Cities were locked down. Even microbes could not exist on the planet’s surface during its day.
Which was why only a daylight raid would succeed.
There was no sensation of falling at all. The air was too thin to be felt. The planet was so far below him that the passing seconds brought its features no closer. He could almost reach out, and clasp a hemisphere in each gauntlet. If not for the madcap race of altimeter runes in his helmet display, he might have believed he flew. He could just about pick out the rest of his kill-team through the radiation glare. They were far below him, freefalling, but still in formation and descending fast.
He turned his head slightly and caught the Storm Eagle as it cushioned off the atmosphere and away. Twenty metres of inertially propelled metal, unpowered, it might as well have been invisible. The precision calculation required to graze a body moving at one hundred and eighty thousand kilometres per second with another impelled towards it from a trillion kilometres away staggered him.
It could only have been achieved with the cooperation of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
He looked back to the planet. He scoured it for the coordinates of the Fists Exemplar fortress. Genhanced synapses lapped at the brink of the neural cascade that would trigger his jump pack as numerals raced across his helm display towards a string of zeroes.
It had to be all together or it might as well be not at all.
Soon.
But not yet.
Valhalla — Kalinin trench
Check 3, -00:03:35
Tulwei stood up on the bike’s foot pegs and looked back over the skull and triple-forked lightning emblem on his pauldron. The command Salamander rumbled up through thick snow, pitted dozer blade ploughing up a great heap of it as if to bank up its own earthwork. Rattling caterpillar tracks threw fresh fall over the idling attack bikes of Kill-Team Tigrus as it pulled in. Its chassis trembled and growled, one big beast asserting dominance over the lesser vehicles that spat and whined around its armour skirts.
‘The one you were sent for is here, all right.’ General Sebko of the Kalinin CCCIII, ‘White Guard’, was swaddled in an ice-camouflage greatcoat with a thick fur collar, gloves, a snow-speckled cap, and snow goggles. Only the pins on his cuff and the iron in his beard distinguished him from the junior staffers bustling about the command tank’s exposed rear section. ‘The orks are dug in deep, and in numbers. It will be a slaughter, my lord.’
‘Let the slaughter be your concern. The Lord Commander’s quarry is ours.’
‘Yes, lord.’
The general had to shout to be heard, or if he was addressing one of his own unaugmented soldiers he probably would have. Earthshaker batteries thumped and thundered. The shaking ground spilled snow into trenches where tens of thousands of heavy-coated soldiers tramped over squelching duckboards. Lasguns in equivalent numbers crackled. Men shouted. Tanks roared. Guns of every calibre voiced their frustration and spite. Hatred was as thick on the air as the slush in the bottom of the tenches, and every degree as bitter.
‘The army goes over on my signal,’ Tulwei roared. He could hear over the din perfectly well. Shouting was out of consideration for the human’s ears.
The likely annihilation of the CCCIII would leave Kalinin’s northern approach wide open, but to to the general’s great credit, he simply saluted. ‘It will, lord.’
‘A full-scale assault on the ork lines will draw them out, and when they come…’ He indicated the trio of black-painted attack bikes grizzling in the snow beside his. Spitting out promethium fumes and snowmelt alongside them were the lavishly baroque gold-and-black bikes of the Sisters of Silence. One of the sidecars was empty. It would not be so for the return ride. Tulwei clapped his gauntlets together. ‘We will wait for word of the witch-breed’s position and be on him like a winter gale.’
Sebko smiled thinly. ‘Show it Valhalla’s warmth.’
Cleaning out the sidecar’s heavy bolter beside Tulwei, Sentar gave an approving chuckle.
The Valhallans’ loathing of the greenskins could have matched their own. Small wonder that their world held out while forge worlds and garrison worlds with standing forces in the billions were ground under the ork war machine like stones under the linked treads of a super-heavy tank.
Tulwei looked to his left. The Dark Angel, Vehuel, throttled his engine, a challenge in his hooded eyes. He looked to his right. The Soul Drinker, Grigorus, looked back, gauntlet over his gear stick, the other on the throttle. Tulwei grinned in anticaption of the great race to come. A countdown timer scrolled down the left-hand side of his helm display.
‘Nearly, brothers.’
And the countdown ended.
Terra — Imperial Palace
Check 0, -00:00:57
The Meridian Chamber, a little known sub-annexe of the Clanium Library, was where the fractal vagaries of Imperial time were charted and thus standardised. Here, seconds, minutes and hours were ticked off, blinked away, their passage marked by the tens of thousands of asynchronous timepieces. The four walls were divided by the four outer segmenta, each one further subdivided by sector, by subsector, and, for particularly prominent, heavily settled regions, by system. Muttering chrono-savants in dusky robes compared neighbouring pieces, meditated over astropath logs and shipping data and, where necessary, made corrections, circled by joyful cherub seraphim. Here, Imperial Standard Time was set.
Koorland, Lord Commander of the Imperium, last of the Imperial Fists, stepped smartly out of the way as one of the hunchbacked magi shuffled blindly across him. Its robes scuffed the floor. Hourglasses adorned with cyberskull motifs and filled with grains of glass swayed from a belt of woven metal. The magos approached the group of chanting acolytes that surrounded the Praeceptor, the master chrono: a scuffed leaden tank the size of a drop pod, delineating Terran time by atomic resonance exactly as it had done for the last thirty thousand years. The magos’ tools clicked and chittered over the venerable machine.